In the conventional manufacture of balloon catheters in medical tubes, for example, the catheters are placed sideways in a long “gutter”-like storage container of about 2 m and are carried between the process steps for coating, balloon folding, withstand pressure test, and packaging. At the individual process steps, the catheters are manually taken out and processed one by one, and then returned one by one into the storage container and carried again to the next step.
However, carrying the long storage container takes a lot of work and requires a carrying space for safe carrying to decrease efficiency. In addition, also at the individual process steps, there is need for spaces for placing the long storage container and handling the taken catheters, which results in larger spaces necessary for the individual steps. That is, there are problems of wider spaces required in the manufacturing process and lower area productivity. In addition, manually handling the catheters one by one is required every time at the individual process steps, which requires large number of man-hours and places a certain limitation on improvement of productivity.
Meanwhile, there has been proposed a carrying palette for endoscopic treatment tools that carries flexible, long finite-length sheath coils as endoscopic treatment tools between the working steps in the manufacturing process of the endoscopic treatment tools or supplies the same to devices used in the manufacturing process, wherein the palette includes: a foldable clamp mechanism part that positions and grasps the plurality of sheath coils bent at the both end sides in a vertical U shape and provided in a line and is capable of changing the grasping positions of the sheath coils between a vertical upper direction and a horizontal lateral direction; and a rectangular frame-like main body that supports the foldable clamp mechanism part without interfering with the sheath coils in the vertical U-shaped posture (refer to Patent Document 1).
According to the carrying palette, it is possible to carry a plurality of sheath coils and supply the same to devices used at the process steps with improvement in production efficiency. Since the sheath coils are grasped in the bent state in the vertical U-shaped posture, there is no problem with short sheath coils. However, long sheath coils would largely sag downward, which deteriorates the workability during carrying and makes it difficult to perform automatic carrying. In addition, the both ends of the sheath coils to be processed vary in height from the floor due to the sag, and the sheath coils are hard to handle when being set to the devices at the process steps, thereby causing a problem of placing a burden on designing of the devices.
Patent Document 1: JP-A No. 2003-47590